June 01, 2003
“Whose is the Kingdom?”
The Sermon on the Plain, Point 1
“Whose is the Kingdom?”
Psalm 19 / Exodus 21: 2-6
Luke 6: 17-21
June 1st, 2003
This morning I begin with you one of the most important and most difficult series of studies it is possible for a pastor to attempt, “The Sermon on the Plain,” that you know best as “the Sermon on the Mount.” This is difficult because, on the one hand, this sermon Jesus “preached” is thought of as the greatest ethical teaching of Jesus, while on the other hand, its ideals seem impossible to achieve.
A Jewish friend of mine told me he didn’t think the Sermon on the Mount was realistic. He is a good fellow, but he told me he had no ambition to follow the way of life it describes. “Turn the other cheek” is nonsense, he said. Christians, however, assume they accept its idea of life. It has become like a beautiful dish propped up in the back of the China cabinet. We look at it but we don’t eat off it.
But there is nothing decorative about the Sermon on the Plain. Of no other aspect of Jesus’ teaching is it more pertinent to say that it has not been tried and found wanting, but not tried, and declared impossible. Then why bother with it? Because it describes for us the core of Jesus’ life. Jesus said, “Come, learn of me.” Here Jesus outlined how to learn of Him.
Part of our difficulty in trying to learn of Jesus here is that He is not telling us things to do, but how to be. We think of obedience usually in terms of what we do. But Jesus is not, for the most part telling us what to do, but how to form our inner selves.
We sometimes refer to Jesus’ teaching here as “the beatitudes.” While this word refers to the word “blessed” with which each statement begins, you may have heard the pun—they are the be-attitudes. That is, they describe attitudes, habits of thought. What we do arises from how we think. Jesus is teaching us deeply how to think—not how to think deeply, but deeply how to think. Here are the seeds of the attitudes that guide us to think as Jesus thought. Here Jesus is carving our souls, shaping the contours of the deep “us.”
Jesus begins each statement with “Blessed are.” He is not commanding but describing. He does not say, “Thou shalt or thou shalt not.” He tells us, “The one who is like this is blessed.” Since we want to be blessed, to have the inner satisfaction of God’s approval, of inner peace, we are lured to the inner quality Jesus is describing with the bait of blessedness. Most of us would say, “I want peace of mind.” But peace of mind is elusive. Many of us live in quiet desperation. I come to church, but why do I always feel so desperate? Inner peace is like a butterfly evading our net. Jesus puts the butterfly within reach of our net. “Blessed are the poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God.” Jesus is describing the roots of our thoughts. How so?
The Apostle Paul wrote of “making every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.” I see that the devil has found a playground in side-tracking Christians in their thought-life. We imagine our thought life means our opinions, or our theology.
As I have watched the tug-o-war going on at the General Assembly between the two sides who argue about the “Fidelity and Chastity Amendment” of our Book of Order, I can hear the Devil smacking his lips. We are focusing furiously on opinions on matters of behavior, and count as our friends those who have the same opinion we do on sexual behavior, and count as enemies those who disagree. Our thought-life has been sabotaged by the devil. We pride ourselves on our opinions on sexual behavior. Such arrogance is found on both sides of the present argument. But how flexible our opinions are. I’ve seen peoples’ opinions on controversial issues turn around so fast that I had to do a double take.
Jesus digs down below our opinions into the roots of our thought life, teaching us how to govern not just what we think, but how we think. Because what we think follows how we think.
The Apostle Paul wrote of a spiritual war in each of us: “bringing every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.” The battlefield is not nearly so much in the realm of particular ideas we have, much less on the outside in terms of what we do. The big battle is prior to that. It is inside--in how we think. If you and I could win in the battlefield of our thought-life, in the warfare of the roots of our thoughts, what we think and what we do would follow like puppies,wagging their little tails.
If the roots of our thoughts are under the control of Jesus, what we think and what we do will be wholesome, obedient to God, giving us peace.
So, our project over the next weeks will be to see how to think as Jesus thought. I pray as I prepare that God will teach me and us the mind of Christ, the attitude of Jesus, from which may flow Jesus’ way of thought and life lived out in my body and in yours.
It would be helpful if you had your Bible open as I think aloud with you because my project with you will be first to understand what Jesus is saying before I think of its application. You may want to have a book mark in Matthew 5, because I hope we may understand the breadth of Jesus’ intentions for us.
You noticed that I refer to our subject as the “Sermon on the Plain,” because in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus speaks these words not on a mountain, but on the plain. In Matthew 5: 1 begins, “Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain.” Luke begins, “And he came down with them and stood on a level place.”
This isn’t a contradiction. Instead it points to a difference between the outlook of these two Gospels. Matthew is a Jew and his gospel is distinctly a Jewish Gospel. He presents Jesus as the One to whom Moses referred in the Book of Deuteronomy, “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brethren, him you shall heed.” Matthew pictures Jesus like Moses up on Mt. Sinai, only now Jesus isn’t receiving the law from God, but He is describing the thought-life of the one who will please God.
Luke on the other hand was written by a Gentile, a Greek physician, and he shows us a picture of Jesus as a non-Jew saw Him. Jesus came down on the plain and mingled with people. A good doctor gets close to patients. Jesus got close to people. Luke describes Jesus as the cardiologist, the heart-doctor, telling us how to think so as to live as He did. Proverbs tells us, “As a person thinks in his heart, so is he.” Jesus is teaching us how to think.
This differences between Matthew and Luke begin in the very first statement. In Matthew Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs (aujtw~n)is the kingdom of heaven.” While Luke tells us Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor for yours (uJmetevra) is the kingdom of God.”
Matthew shows us Jesus looking down from the mountain top on the verge of heaven far from earth—speaking of them. Luke shows us Jesus looking around at the people gathered around him speaking of you all.
Matthew says Jesus said “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Luke says Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor.” What did Jesus say? There is nothing ethically superior about economic poverty. Who are the poor? The poor are those who realize their spiritual poverty. You can have no money or property, be economically poor, and be filled with jealousy for those who are rich. There’s no blessedness in this poverty. You can be spit-poor materially and long for wealth, so that you are bitter. If you are poor and waste your money on lottery tickets to become rich, you are anything but blessed.
But if you are like the deer that pants for a flowing stream in the desert, longing for God, Jesus tells you, “You are blessed for the Kingdom of God belongs to you.” This poverty has nothing to do with economic circumstances. The sense of need for God breeds the words of the 63rd Psalm, “O God, Thou art my God, early will I seek Thee. My soul longs for thee; my flesh faints for Thee as in a dry and thirsty land where no water is.” This is the poverty that is blessed. When you look up on a starry night and find yourself feeling the thoughts penned by the psalmist in Psalm 8, “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, what is man that Thou art mindful of Him, or the son of man that Thou visitest him?” then your heart knows what it is to be blessed.
What do you think about during the day? How do you begin thinking? Do you think about how you’re going to pay your bills? Do you think about getting a better job? Do you think about the clothes you want to buy, or the car, or the vacation that you’re sure would make you happy? What do you think about? What drives those thoughts? Jesus teaches us, and we know He is right—we can sense it is right—that if our thoughts are governed by our awareness of our need for God first, then we are blessed. It seems a contradiction to say, but we are never closer to God than when we feel our need for God. It is those who never think about their need for God who are farthest from God.
How I think of my wife is governed with how I need God. How you think about your career has begun with how you think of or do not think of God’s role in your life. How you think of patriotism, of our nation’s enemies, about 9/11, about every thing you hold most dear and most detestable begins with how you think of God’s place in your life. That’s why Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God.”
Lots of people are full of patriotism, full of appropriate hatred of the enemy, full of community pride, full of pride in their families, full of much that we applaud, but God may be far removed from the roots of their thoughts. Blessed are those who know they need God above all else. Jesus said, “Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and you’ll get everything else.” How the “everything else” that you want hinges on seeking God first. Augustine said, “Love God and do as you please.” A lot of people only catch the last part, “Do as you please,” and try to love God from there, and it doesn’t work.
Who qualifies to get the Kingdom of God? In both Matthew and Luke I notice that Jesus spoke to his disciples rather than to everyone. Both Matthew and Luke tell us of two categories of people who came to Jesus: the crowds and His disciples. Luke says there was a great crowd of disciples, very many people from near and far, suggesting that many more people wanted to learn of Jesus than Matthew had in mind.
Matthew tells us that Jesus left the crowds, separating Himself with His disciples. By this time it seems Jesus only had four disciples, Andrew, Peter, James and John . Matthew accentuates that Jesus’ teaching will not be for everyone, only for His disciples, those who learn of Him. There is a difference between those who come to Jesus for His touch and those who come to Him to learn of Him. Luke suggests that there were more who wanted to learn of Jesus than Matthew had in mind. Perhaps this reflects the Jewish-ness of Matthew, the exclusiveness. But there is a distinct difference between the “crowd mentality” and the “learner-of-Jesus” mentality.
This distinction appears still today. Many of us want Jesus’ touch. We like being in the crowd as He walks by, hoping for His healing, His comfort, His healing our financial crisis, His help to get ahead, even His peace of mind. But not all of us want to learn of Him. We display which we are in how we regard what Jesus teaches, rather than how we regard Jesus as a source of help and comfort. Learning of Jesus requires more than walking in the crowd that surges around Him.
Finally, what did Jesus mean by the Kingdom of God that belongs to the poor? Is there a Kingdom of God and some other kingdom? Jesus was not talking about the Created order which God governs. He was not talking about God’s reign over nature, giving regular patterns of summer, fall, winter, and springtime—giving rain and sunshine—governing the progress of human history. All of these represent God’s reign, it is true, but it is possible to be under the control of God’s created order while thinking as a complete maverick—and enduring the consequences.
The Kingdom of God is the domain of those who deliberately call Him King. The Kingdom of God of which Jesus speaks is the province in which He lived that found Him continually deferring to the will of His Father. “My will is to do the will of Him who sent me,” Jesus said. And the will of any of us who are in the Kingdom of God is deliberately informed by the thinking in terms of the will of God.
You might think it presumptuous to imagine that we can know the will of God about everything. Indeed, I’m leery about people who overtly talk about knowing the will of God. But that’s another thing entirely from having the purpose to live by the will of God. Jesus didn’t teach us to be forever talking about knowing the will of God. He talked about desiring the will of God.
If you want to live according to the will of God, even if you don’t know what that will is in terms of specifics, then you are thinking Kingdom of God thoughts. When the root of your thought-life is planted in the desire to submit to the will of God, then the thoughts you think and the life you live will display the will of God. “I being in the way, the Lord led me.” If you want to know the will of God, so that you can do it, your spiritual poverty will drive you in the way of God.
In Psalm 1 we read, “Happy is the one whose delight is in the law of the Lord, who is like a tree planted by a river of water.” It is a picture of a well-rooted tree, nourished by the water and the nutritious silt that flows along a river bank. The only people who root themselves in the law of the Lord are those who are spiritually poor, who feel their need for God. It all starts with the root of your thoughts. Spiritual poverty. The sense of basic need, not for great thoughts, not for stuff—money, what money can buy, but for something deeper. And this “deeper” points toward God. How happy you are if the driving purpose of your life is a need for God.
You need God more than you need any thing God has made. You are happy when you know this. You are blessed when you live with your purpose deeply rooted in hungering and thirsting for God. This will put everything that happens to you in a different perspective than if you are living to maximize your life in all the usual ways.
So, what should you do in response? Begin by praying, “O Lord, take from me the hunger for things that do not and cannot satisfy me. Give me a hunger for you.” Blessed are the spiritually poor, the spiritually thirsty and hungry, for yours is the Kingdom of God. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)